Death & Memory – Past & Present

What’s Wrong with Photographing the Dead?

Like many amateur and professional historians and archaeologists (including those interested in family history (genealogy), the history of death, social history, as well as landscape history) and the many, many more people who visit historic sites for a variety of leisure and educational interests, I regularly take photographs of gravestones in cemeteries and churchyards. Indeed, I have conducted a series of archaeological graveyard surveys (with permission of the relevant authorities) which, while not in the public domain, I have used as part of my teaching and research and I have plan to work further on this research area.

This evening I read that Birmingham City Council has banned an amateur group of historians (The Jewellery Quarter Research Trust) from photographing any more historic gravestones for inclusion in their database of the Warstone Lane and Key Hill Cemeteries. Only by written permission and on a case-by-case basis will they consider permitted photographs. The story is here and here. Check out their fab website here.

What is not satisfactorily reported is the reasoning behind Birmingham City Council from making this stipulation, and it clearly hasn’t been communicated to the historical group in question who publicly express their view that the ban is unworkable and incomprehensible. It isn’t clear what information held in these photographs might be sensitive or problematic, and certainly none of the details of the gravestones are the property of the council in any case.

Let me make the key points clear:

Yes, these are cemeteries owned by and managed by the city council, and gravestones presumably remain the families’;

However, these sites are already heritage attractions with regular guided tours including ghost walks;

The sites regularly feature on heritage trails of the Jewellery Quarter;

The cemeteries are in receipt of £1.3 million of Heritage Lottery Fund grants to pay for restoration work;

Local councillor has made public his view that working with voluntary groups to foster engagement with local heritage is absolutely essential;

If there is a problem, then why aren’t Birmingham City Council asking for existing photographs to be taken down from the JQRT’s website?

Looking elsewhere across the internet, I found another story about a potential ban on graveyard photography in a part of Northern Ireland ahead of plans by the Brigham Young University in Utah to create a BillionGraves.com web-based app to GPS record headstone positions worldwide. Here, the Sinn Fein Councillor who responded was aware that the distinction of permission related to the council ownership of the site but the family ownership of the gravestones.

Yet do owners, managers and families have the right to object to photographs of their property being photographed in a public place? Well, cemeteries and churchyards, while publicly accessible, are not really public spaces. Moreover, gravestones are not owned by those who manage the space but by families. Therefore, even if the gravestones were owned by the landowner, that owners of space and memorial (individual, family, private company, religious organisation or local authority) do have rights to set rules on behaviour and activity.

In an extreme case, St Mary’s Whitby has banned photography taking place given the large number of Goths languishing on gravestones here: this is the churchyard associated with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This is an interesting parallel, since this churchyard closed in 1861 and still photographs around and on the graves was seen as disrespectful and the activities of Goths distasteful to the rector of the church.

But is it really a good idea to ban, or tightly control photography in cemeteries and churchyards? No! And here are some (admittedly overlapping) reasons:

Photography is an integral part of recording listed monuments as primary record for genealogists and archaeologists: it is essential to our work and we need to do en masse for information to be of relevance and use;

Photographs are an important medium of popular engagement with heritage of all kinds including memorial art and monuments and including historic cemeteries and churchyards. It puts people off visiting if they feel their behaviour is being monitored and criticised;

It is almost impossible to avoid gravestones appearing in photographs within cemeteries and churchyards when they are not the primary focus of interest;

Photographs are a cheap and easy way of recording memorials, the vast majority of which are not individually listed. Therefore the public’s photographs might be all there is in terms of formal recording;

Photographs should be the copyright of the composer, not the subject matter, unless it is in private space. I defer to legal experts on this point, but I really think that publicly accessible spaces should not be stifled by photograph bans when living things are not the subject;

Most of the gravestones under discussion were raised long before living memory, and even if descendants survive, it is difficult to understand how photographs of monuments could cause offence to them;

The very tradition of gravestones is an historically situated one and speaks of family’s wishes for the dead to be remembered and recalled publicy by non-relatives: photography extends this tradition and does not counter it. It is not an infringement on private space;

There are absolutely no theological or traditional religious or social reason why recording gravestones in any fashion, including photography, can be construed as an inherently disrespectful act. There are simply no ethical issues surrounding the photography of gravestones unless defamatory comments are made about their appearance or text. I regard even graveyard and cemetery ‘selfies’, as long as gravestones and offerings are not interfered with or subject to unnecessary or tasteless comment, are appropriate;

Gravestones are a threatened historical resource, subject to all manner of natural and human agencies that might foster their destruction including vandalism. Without a detailed record of photographs circulating of these spaces, it is surprising how much will be lost before it is formally recorded. Moreover, multiple photographs over time can allow monitoring of their state of preservation. Finally, the more images are circulated, the more they are likely to be respected, understood and thus preserved;

I cannot see any possible benefit to authorities or users in restricting gravestone photography as long as the taking of photographs does not infringe on living people, including mourners and other formal ceremonies taking place in churchyards or cemeteries. There is no profit to be made from the sale of photographs and very few artists and researchers make money out of the photographs they take;

Taxpayers directly or indirectly pay for the maintenance of these environments, and therefore surely these are not spaces sacrosanct to mourners only;

I cannot see how a ban on photography can be enforced in open-air spaces that are publicly accessible;

I can only see it as positive that we encourage any legal activities in cemeteries that keep them ‘alive’ within local communities. Without fostering such engagements, how can we expect communities to respect and value them?

We need to specifically foster digital public mortuary archaeology: the use of digital media to engage communities with their local heritage, including their churchyards and cemeteries, as discussed here.

Therefore, in summary, I think this startling and incomprehensible case in Birmingham will hopefully be a idiosyncratic response of an ill-considered pen-pusher at the city council, rather than the beginning of a wider ban on photography in accessible cemeteries and churchyards maintained by tax-payers’ money.

What’s wrong with photographing gravestones? Absolutely nothing in my view. There is plenty that is good about it in archaeological, heritage, historical and other regards.

What’s wrong with photographing the bodies of the dead? That is a far more complicated question and a short answer could be ‘depends…’ Like it or not, millions of photographs of cadavers and skeletons are found through the internet already… This should be of concern and debate far more than photography of memorials and monuments!

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Published by Prof. Howard M. R. Williams

Researcher and teacher in early medieval archaeology, contemporary archaeology, mortuary archaeology, the archaeology of memory and the history of archaeology. MA Archaeology of Death and Memory
View all posts by Prof. Howard M. R. Williams

A superb, common-sense approach to the whole subject, that all those charged with the responsibility for preservation, maintenance and upkeep of the resting places of our ancestors should read and take note.

Before banning any picture of any grave, Birmingham City Council should be compelled to ask permission to those who are buried there… Seriously, that ban is utterly preposterous… and harmful to the memory of the deads.

Very interesting perspective, thank you.This is not a new issue though – Family History Societies all over the UK have had long experience in getting permission for their genealogical surveys of graveyards and cemeteries. Our own work with historicgraves.com always starts with meetings on permission and defining terms of partnership in a project. Occasionally permission is refused and where a local authority is unwilling to take part in a project there can be big gaps in a survey. But no permission means no published survey. Having said that I suspect 95% of online graveyard surveys have been done without permission.

Hear, Hear! There are many older graveyards that I surveyed and photographed over a decade ago, having visiting some of them more recently some of the memorials have become broken or illegible, if I wasn’t permitted to photograph these at the time then the memorials (which I have put online) would be lost forever as the council had not conducted their own survey.

If it wasn’t for a photograph taken in 1961 we would have no idea of where an ancestor was buried. Years later the stone was nowhere to be found and the church didn’t have any plot records.

However the photo didn’t turn up until we were turning out a house. On returning to the church with the photo I could identify the plot. I also spotted the stone but broken into three pieces and dumped on the edge of the cemetery. With permission I was able to lay the stone flat on the ground on the grave.

An often seen sentiment on old headstones is “When this you see, remember me.” The main point of markers is to remind people of those gone before–or why put them up? Too, often the only remaining record of past generations is those markers, I have confirmed several ancestors by finding the headstones, they are a priceless resource.

I looked into this on Tuesday – the City Council are implementing an archaic bit of red tape from a 1977 Cemetaries Order, article 35 stating that photography is not permitted. So this is less a 21st Century imposed decision made with sub-par logic, but a rediscovery of a rule that no-one really agrees with yet, but which officious Council staff feel bound to uphold.

I suppose we shouldn’t ignore the fact that gravestone surveys have long been used to generate revenue. The grand-daddy ‘findagrave’ sticks awful ads on the side or top of their screens & is now part of Ancestry.com -still freely available though. Haven’t logged into Billiongraves but it is part of MyHeritage. Family History Societies have been charging for access to their survey records also. The excellent http://www.twgpp.org/search.php charge £4 to email a higher quality photo of the gravestone. In many cases I suspect the charges hardly cover the real costs of running the services but in other cases there is potential for large profits to be generated. With historicgraves.com we charge for training and that just covers costs.
Graveyard surveys & projects need to find sustainable means of funding the surveys & subsequent archiving. Am guessing local authorities are quite clued into this.

Photographic record is very often the only record of vandalised monuments and should be encouraged. Monumental inscriptions already taken by family history groups sometimes not enough. Let us modernise research not supress it.

I’m in the United States, so our laws may be a bit different. The cemetery owner (even if a city or other government entity) can make whatever rules they want. It is no different than when a city makes a rule about what activities can or cannot be conducted in a city park, such as “no skateboarding on sidewalks” or “no alcoholic beverages in the park”. If photography is banned in the cemetery, that ban would apply to everyone, not just one group. If someone violated the rule and photographed stones in the cemetery, the owners would be able to expel the person from the cemetery at that time and even possibly ban them from visiting the cemetery in the future but would not be able to do anything about the photos he/she had taken. However, here in the U.S., anything that can be seen from public property, like a sidewalk or street, can be legally photographed without asking permission from the owner. Google Earth is a great example of that. My house was photographed from the city street. They did not need to ask my permission because they weren’t coming onto my property. Nor did they need to notify me. Without question, Google owns the copyright just as I own the copyright of every photograph I take. As both an amateur photographer (including cemetery photography) and a cemetery trustee, I believe in following the rules, even when I don’t agree with all or some of the rules. While I would hope the city council would be more forthcoming with their reasons for deciding to uphold that old rule, I would still abide by it.

Also in the US, in parts of the American South, cemetery photography is simply a given. Families pose with tombstones almost as though posing with their late relative, and include these pictures in family albums like it is no big deal. Sometimes they even gather around the casket like “hey, let’s get Grandma in the picture!” So the idea of banning photography in a cemetery would not be well received around certain part of the US, but bless their hearts for tryin’….

very interesting!
It does bother me immensely that share-holder driven, money-making organizations like Billiongraves charges a fortune and makes money on contributions supplied for free by the public…a smart set up!
With Churches, especially, in absolute dire need of money for ongoing up-keep and maintenance, it seems to me that Churches would be smart to start doing their own thing photoing and recording and copy righting , and charging for it to bring in money to support themselves and the local economy! I’d support that by donating my photos to the Church or local authority.

Personally, I would not be averse to the approach taken by some English cathedrals, where a donation is requested to authorise photography, and would willingly make a donation towards the upkeep of a church – my Council Tax goes towards municipal cemeteries – that is if so many of them were not locked.

A very good article I completely agree with your views about photographing memorials to the dead. Gravestones contain a lot of information which do advance family history studies. I think it is a completely different matter however when sites use photographs of recently excavated human remains on social media as part of an advertising ploy. Working as a commercial archaeologist on cemetery excavations I would not dream of distributing photographs of human remains online and most certainly would not do so with a grinning volunteer showing how much fun they are having on the site. Not only do I find it disrespectful for the exhumed but it is also an act ignorant of contemporary people’s different beliefs and values about death and personhood and personally does not give me a good impression about the organisations that do such things.

Have been photographing graves and cemeteries up here in the North East for years, (love finding the 16/1700 ones!) and so far never been asked not to, I would be mortified if some one thought I was being disrespectful. Fab article!